Any electricians here? I'm trying to hook up a piece of electric baseboard heat and I'm stumped. The tag says it's 240 volts, but there's only one wire. Is it just not usable for a single unit with a 240V supply, or is there a way to hook this up? Both ends are essentially the same. Thanks.

My step-dad's an electrician, I'll ask him. Are you saying it only has a plugin for a 120v outlet? Or are you talking about just the one wire going to the heating element?

Update: You should have three wires, generally a black, white, and bare ground wire. Does the wire there strip out into three? You need to have two hots and a ground going into the element he said, I think on either side. That's about all he can do without being there in person .

Edited by Kamikaze_Badger, 29 December 2012 - 01:28 PM.

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I think I have my answer, cut the single wire to create 2 ends, one for each leg of the 220. There is a ground lug. The unit is a little cosmetically challenged from sitting in my shop for 30 years, but it has never been used. An air dusting inside, some steel wool and spray paint outside, I should be good to go. If i was worried about 30 year old wires, I'd have to rewire my whole house, lol.

BUT my brother is and he taught me enough for my personal use and since I have wired over 3000 feet of wire in my house, a sub panel, receptacles, switches, lights, etc and I have NEVER encountered anything with only 1 wire.

Electricity flows in a circuit which by definition needs a wire to enter and a wire to leave.

Some old school electricians did something called "breaking the neutral" where they carried load on the white (neutral) wire but that is no longer acceptable as it charges your neutrals & at the panel also.

So, like a previous poster said, there has to be another wire somewhere. Your house will have a wire with at least 3 wires in it, a black, white, and bare copper. For a 240volt you should use 12/3 to supply the electricty and it will have 4 wires in it: black, red, white, and bare copper. The black and the red supply the juice and the white is the neutral with the bare the ground.

Not sure what you mean by cutting the one wire to hook it up to the two legs of the 240. Do you mean to splice a pigtail to the one wire you have, giving you 2 and then hooking those up to the heater?

Whatever you do, it sounds like a wire is broken off somewhere. From looking at the pic, tothe left of the black wire is asmall tan nub that looks like the paper that typically wraps a wire. Is that another wire, just broken off so you can't see it?